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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25456063">Absolute Power</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/crochetaway/pseuds/crochetaway'>crochetaway</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Hermione's Haven Bingo 2020 [14]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Modern AU, Modern Muggle AU, Muggle AU</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 09:41:34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,758</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25456063</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/crochetaway/pseuds/crochetaway</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom Riddle doesn't want much. Just absolute power. And Hermione Granger is the woman to get him there.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Hermione Granger/Tom Riddle</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Hermione's Haven Bingo 2020 [14]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1833604</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>93</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Hermione's Haven Bingo 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Absolute Power</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>
  <b>Created for Hermione's Haven Bingo 2020 Fest! This is for my N4 square which was the prompt: Tom Riddle.</b>
</p><p>  <b>No beta, just Grammarly. If you love this (or hate it) please let me know about in a review! Find me on Tumblr at crochetawayhpff.</b></p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  
</p>
<hr/><p>Hermione Granger was suspicious of Tom Riddle from the start. First of all, what kind of name was Riddle anyway? He sounded like a villain from the Batman cartoon series she used to watch when she was a child.</p><p>Then there was his background. Or rather, lack of background. She couldn’t find a damned thing out about him. Not one. Not where he came from. Not what he did before taking the job in her department. Nothing. How would he have even gotten hired? It just didn’t make sense. Nothing about the man made sense.</p><p>If there was something Hermione hated most in the world, it was an unsolved problem. And Tom Riddle was definitely a problem.</p><p>It wasn’t just his seemingly impossible background, it was also how he acted, how he carried himself in the office. And especially the idiotic suggestions he made to “improve operations”. As if Hermione hadn’t been making those same suggestions for years only to have them fall on deaf ears.</p><p>Except.</p><p>Except they weren’t falling on deaf ears when Tom made them. No, the executive committee and the Minister fell all over themselves to implement as many of those suggestions as quickly as they could. Hermione should have been happy about it, they were common sense suggestions that would increase productivity while reducing the amount of time it took to do some of the simplest tasks. But she wasn’t happy about it. Not even a little bit.</p><p>Because they weren’t Tom’s suggestions, were they? They were <em>her</em> bloody suggestions. Logically, she knew that anyone with a modicum of common sense would make some of the same suggestions she had been making. But Hermione wasn’t thinking logically these days. She knew she was being downright illogical, but she couldn’t help it. Something about Tom Riddle made her paranoid as hell.</p><p>Just looking at him made her eyeballs itch and she couldn’t figure out <em>why</em>. There was something wrong, something <em>off</em> about him, but nobody else seemed to see it. She’d asked all of her friends, both the ones in her department and out of it, if they saw it too. None of them did. They all said that Tom was a great bloke. Good-natured and easy-going, as Ron had told her.</p><p>Maybe. But it felt fake to Hermione. Everything about him felt fake. She just wished she knew why. And how.</p><p>Ruminating on all of that for weeks was how she came up with her most hare-brained scheme yet. It also found her dressed in all black outside of Tom Riddle’s flat in the middle of the night. She had already checked his car a few weeks ago. It was clean. Too clean. She didn’t think that would have changed in the intervening weeks.</p><p>And she needed to do what she was thinking now, while Tom was out of town on a business trip. It was only a short one, but she’d seen the receipt for the hotel room. He was due to arrive home in two days. Hermione didn’t think she would need two nights to search his apartment, but she had them, just in case.</p><p>Breaking and entering wasn’t really in Hermione’s wheelhouse, but she was a fast learner and she’d dated a petty thief during university who had taught her a thing or two. Mostly, she used her ability to pick locks as a cheap party trick to subvert people’s expectations of her. She was always seen as the straight-laced goody-two-shoes, but she wasn’t, not really. That’s just the image she projected onto the world. She wasn’t above breaking a few rules to get what she wanted or to correct an injustice. And Tom Riddle was an injustice (to her at least).</p><p>She took a deep breath, checked her surroundings one last time, and headed up the stairs to Riddle’s second floor flat. She’d practiced with the lock-picking set her old boyfriend had gifted her quite a bit over the last few weeks and was inside Riddle’s flat within thirty seconds. The lights were all out, which was to be expected, but the flat didn’t feel empty. The minute she had stepped inside, she felt as if someone’s eyes were on her.</p><p>The lock picking tools were tucked into the inner pocket of her leather jacket and she pulled out a penlight at the same time. Flicking it on she had the scare of her life.</p><p>“Hello, Granger,” Tom Riddle said from his seat on his sofa.</p><p>“What the fuck?” Hermione muttered under her breath, as she tried to recover. “What are you doing just sitting in the dark?”</p><p>“I should be the one asking you what you’re doing breaking into my flat,” Riddle replied. A smirk danced at the corner of his full lips.</p><p>She had to give it to him, Riddle was exceptionally good-looking. It had crossed her mind that with him being a man and a pretty one, at that, was why he had been listened to when she had been ignored. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was <em>wrong</em> with Riddle. And that <em>wrongness</em> was how he was getting things done.</p><p>“But, I’ll answer your question. I was waiting for you, Granger.”</p><p>Hermione shuddered, she didn’t like how he said her name. He caressed it with his tongue in a way that others may have found sensual, but she only found creepy.</p><p>“How did you know—”</p><p>“That you were going to break into my flat? After you broke into my car, I expected it. It’s why I booked that fake trip. To give you an opportunity. You’re welcome, by the way.” The smirk was full-blown. He leaned back on his brown leather sofa, barely visible in her penlight, and stretched his long arms along the top. Looking very comfortable, despite someone having just broken into his home.</p><p>Hermione clenched her jaw, unsure of what to do now. She’d broken at least three laws. And it didn’t seem like Riddle was going to let her walk out of here.</p><p>“What do you want?” she asked him.</p><p>Riddle’s smirk blossomed into a full-grown grin. “Right to the heart of the matter. I knew you were bright. There was a reason I picked you, of course.”</p><p>“Picked me?” Hermione asked. What on earth was he talking about?</p><p>“Yes. You see, I chose you to be the one to help me in my endeavors. You’re the most ambitious, and while the Minister doesn’t take your suggestions to heart, you’re brilliant. You’re the brains I need behind my charm.” His grin seemed more sinister than his smirk, somehow.</p><p>“What exactly are you aiming to accomplish?” Hermione asked, feeling a little breathless. Tom Riddle was a monster, and she was beginning to think that he might not be of the human sort, which was insane, of course, but the longer she spent in his presence, the more convinced of that fact she became.</p><p>“Power, of course,” Riddle laughed lightly.</p><p>Hermione scoffed, as scared as she was, his goals were ludicrous. “I won’t help you,” she replied fiercely.</p><p>“Then rot in a jail cell,” Tom snapped. He stood suddenly from the sofa and crossed the room to where she was standing with three short strides. He reached a hand out and she flinched back from him, but all he did was turn on the lights. Then in the same movement, he had her back pressed up against the door. “Your choice is simple, Granger. Help me, or I’ll call the police and report this.”</p><p>Hermione shook her head. “I’d rather go to jail than help you.”</p><p>The angry look on Riddle’s face had her blood run cold. “If you won’t do it for yourself do it for your friends, your family. I can make your life very uncomfortable.”</p><p>“Uncomfortable how?” Hermione couldn’t stop herself from asking.</p><p>“I’ve been around a long time,” he murmured into her ear. He was towering over her now, not just standing in front of her, but caging her in. “A very long time. I’ve done a lot of things in my life that would turn the pretty hair on your head completely white. I know where your parents live in Oxfordshire,” Hermione gasped, “I know where your grandparents live too, and your aunts and uncles and cousins. Nothing is a secret from me and I’m not above arranging for an accident for any one of those people if you are unwilling to cooperate.”</p><p>“What do I get if I do cooperate?” Hermione asked. She looked up at him and was startled to see his eyes flash red at her. It was gone a moment later and she wasn’t sure if she imagined it or not.</p><p>Riddle’s lips curved in an approving smile. “I can give you the world. Every policy you’ve ever wanted to be enacted, every injustice corrected, with you by my side we can make over the world.”</p><p>His words were alluring, to say the least. Hermione had gotten into politics to do those things, to make the world a better place, to correct injustices, but she knew that doing it Riddle’s way would be like cheating. Was she above cheating? Five or ten years ago, the answer would have been clear. Now? Now she wasn’t so sure.</p><p>“What are you?” she asked.</p><p>“How perceptive,” Riddle replied, his lips hovering near her cheek. “Not many people are able to tell that I’m not <em>quite</em> human.”</p><p>Her breath caught in her throat. He’d admitted it, what she had been thinking all these weeks. She knew there was something off about him and now she was sure of it.</p><p>“So…” she prompted. She desperately wanted to know. If he wasn’t human, what was he? Some sort of vampire? Or demon, maybe? Werewolf?</p><p>“I don’t think you need to hold all the cards, just yet,” Riddle replied. “Perhaps in time, we can discuss this again. For now, I need to know. Are you with me? Or shall I get started arranging accidents?”</p><p>Hermione bit her lip. Her life would never be the same no matter which way she chose. She didn’t think Riddle would stop even if she somehow convinced her entire extended family to pack up and move continents. She knew he was a creature who was used to getting what he wanted. He wanted world domination, Hermione wanted world peace. Were they mutually exclusive? She was starting to think they didn’t have to be.</p><p>“Alright,” she agreed. “I’ll help you.”</p><p>“Excellent,” he murmured against her cheek a moment before pressing his lips to hers.</p><p>
  <em>
    <strong>~Fin~</strong>
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